An aristocracy of virtue: Seneca on the beginnings of wisdom

Summary

In the matter of birth, as in other matters, Roman society of the early Principate exhibits a tension between ideology and practice. Implicit in the Roman notion of an ordo senatorius, into which members are inscribed at birth, or in the distinctions between slave and free, Romanus and municeps, is a premium on beginnings, of self, family, and nation. At the same time, the relative frequency of movement across what might appear to be rigid boundaries (slave/free, decurion/equestrian/senatorial) weakened the authority of beginnings to the advantage of achievement, connections, and luck. This tension, which might have been expected to dissolve with the transition from one social system to another, was in fact perpetuated by the political stagnation and retrogressive modes of acculturation characteristic of the era. Politics of the period can be described as an equilibrium of balanced antagonisms between princeps, aristocrats, and arrivistes, while education promised social mobility to those most skilled at manipulating the symbols of an ossified cultural tradition.

It is in this context of a competition or tension between the age-old authority of birth and the birth of new forms of authorization that the Senecan invitation to begin to live (incipere vivere) must be understood. The readers of Seneca's dialogues and letters – like virtually all readers in the Roman world – would have been members of the economic elites, and thus benefited from certain aspects of the fixity and stratification of the Roman social system.